Happy Birthday Jesus!

Two days before Christmas we decided to spend the day really celebrating Jesus' birthday! Throughout the whole Christmas season we try to emphasis that Christmas really is about the birth of Jesus, but we wanted to spend a whole day just our little family being together and focusing on Christ and celebrating Him!
So we started out our little celebration with some lights (and obviously taking some pictures in the lights)!

No worries- we promptly stopped him from chewing on the lights!

We may go to a Baptist church, but we love dancing so of course our celebration had to involve some dancing (mostly done by Lily and Heart Bear)!

And while Lily was dancing Eli mostly watched (and chewed on things).

Lights...Dancing...and Cake! Every year for the last few years we have made Jesus a birthday cake- it's one of our favorite traditions. Here's Lily putting the finishing touches on the birthday cake-sprinkles!

And birthday candles!

Lots of birthday candles- I let Lily do as many as she wanted and she wanted pretty much the whole box (I guess she figures that Jesus IS pretty old)!

And for Lily no party is complete without decorations (she loves to decorate)- so we decided to make some candy inspired ornaments to decorate with. Here is Lily and Eli patiently watching and waiting for the candy ornaments to melt in the over.

And ummm...they didn't turn out exactly like they should have. The candy should have melted into pretty stained glass shapes to hang. But when you forget to line the cookie cutters with foil (oops) then what you get is something a little more exotic! And actually they turned out really interesting and beautiful- kind of just like Jesus himself.

See- beautiful.

And the scene is set for our celebration! Lily wanted to include her alarm clock so that she would know exactly when the party was starting (even though the party really was going on all day)!

And before we knew it it was time for the party!

We started with a gift for Jesus. This is our brand new family tradition. Every Christmas we will give Jesus a birthday gift- something we think he would like. This year our whole little family gathered around the computer, checked out the World Vision International website, and discussed our options. And in the end our present for Jesus was buying 10 ducks for an international family in need. The ducks will help the family get food (eggs), income (selling the eggs, down, and future ducks), and even fertilizer. I think that Jesus probably enjoyed this gift as much as we enjoyed giving it.
After presents we enjoyed a lovely dinner together and then...

Cake!

We sang Happy Birthday to Jesus and then decided to let Lily blow out the candles (somehow very fitting since this was the year that Lily invited Christ into her heart)!

And I just loved this series of pictures as Lily blew out the candles and things gradually got darker.

And after enjoying cake Jesus was finally placed in the manger and we all snuggled up on the couch to read the Christmas story.

The whole day was just fun and joyful and that's probably because our focus was on the true giver of Joy. Happy birthday Jesus!